How do I adjust the volume of my recordings using Audacity?

With Faithlife Proclaim, you can set up recording cues to capture your sermon, then publish it to your podcast feed and share on social media channels as soon as your service is over. The recording also stays with your presentation in the cloud, so if you don’t have time to upload the audio to your website after your service, you can do it later from another computer running Proclaim.

Proclaim lets you trim your audio and choose a sound bite, but we recommend Audacity if you need to make additional changes. Here’s how to use Audacity to make edits to your recording.

Note: this article involves the use of third-party software (Audacity) to edit an audio file outside of Proclaim. It is important that you do not make any trim edits in Audacity when following the steps in this article.

Tip: If you need help finding this location on a Mac, press command + spacebar to open Spotlight. Type "~/Library/Application Support/Proclaim/Data" in the input box and press the return key. Select a user (which may look like a random string of words and numbers), "Audio Recordings", and locate the sermon.

Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Proclaim\Data\[USER FOLDER]\AudioRecordings\

Note: Each Proclaim user has their own folder in "Data." If more than one person uses Proclaim on your machine, you may need to follow these steps several times to find out which data folder is yours.

Each folder in the AudioRecordings directory is representative of an individual audio recording. Sort the data in this folder by date modified to find your most recent audio recording folder and open it. A single audio file, merged.wav, is located in this folder.

Step 3: Adjust the volume

Open the "merged.wav" audio file in Audacity (you may need to right-click and choose "Open with"). Remember, donot make trim changes inAudacity.On the left side of the screen is the gain (in dB), which can be adjusted to increase or decrease the volume of the recording. You can also make other volume adjustments from the Effects menu (e.g., Amplify).

Once you have adjusted the volume of the recording to your liking, export the audio file in its original location. Click File > Export > Export as WAV.

Note: It may be easier to export the file to a known location (like your Desktop) and then drag and drop the adjusted "merged.wav" file to the original location to replace it.

With the service open, click "Recordings" in the top navigation bar to find your service recording. The audio level changes will be reflected.